About Project Natal: the future or a gimmick?
Just a few weeks ago Microsoft has announced they will premiere their new motion sensing technology at the upcoming E3 in June and a lot of buzz has obviously started among both developers and fan/hate boys…
Will it be the revolution in gaming it promises or will it just turn out to be another gimmick that almost no one will really care about?
IMHO, a lot will depend on how Natal is going to be brought to market: to be successful, from the first day after its release it should be an integral part of the 360 and be bundled with all new consoles. Otherwise there is the serious risk that, even if it will be able to potentially fulfill its very ambitious aims, it may still not reach a widespread market penetration and then just be perceived as another “eye-toy” sort-of add-on that can be skipped without crippling the overall/general gaming experience on the platform.
This, btw, should also be the path that Sony'd follow with its PS Move and, interestingly something that, somehow, Nintendo forgot to do with the Motion+… de facto making it an add-on that may not be fully supported by third parties in a near future. In fact, companies may prefer to move to other technologies (Move or Natal) where they would soon be able to count on an almost 100% installed base.
Many would object that the costs would be too high to make this approach feasible but considering there's always the push to bring down console manufacturing costs, it shouldn't be a big issue to bundle the new peripherals and just delay the next price cut (which some analysts already predict to happen by September this year). Besides, if console manufacturers were really hoping to make money out of hardware sales, they wouldn't sell their consoles below costs in the first place, right?
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